The text of a talk given by Eugene Halliday to a meeting in Liverpool. Tape number 230

It is quite obvious that of the millions of people that we know, they
don't strive for perfection at all. Most of them don't strive at all in
any way because striving implies the application of effort over a time
in some sort of directional sense. Most people don't have a directional
sense and don't strive. If we were to be quite technical about the word
people, the word people means knee-benders or sexually determined, and
people as such, move along lines of least resistance determined by
pleasure and pain. Sexual impulses are at the back of every motive they
have. That is the proper definition of the word people.

If we say there is a pyramid in the world and the top brick of this
pyramid should not be represented, as in the great pyramid it was not.
The top brick represents the Infinite or the Aleph, the letter A.
Immediately below this is the line for all those people who are
cosmically conscious. Immediately we have said people, we have said,
knee-benders. These who are cosmically conscious, bend the knee to the
principle of Logos. They actually believe that reason is inherent in
the universe and they bend the knee to reason. The Greek word Logos
means ratio. Remember that the letter L is like a triangle and the
letter G is like a triangle and we surround it with the Os and S. We
have a system of two wheels, one inside the other and these two wheels
represent the physical body and the subtle body, your material and your
idea body, and coming out of the centre of it is the S which means
Spirit. This Spirit, as transcendent, is called Spirit and is free, and
as involved in identification with the body, either the gross material
body or the subtle body of the ideas we call soul. Soul is Spirit
identified with a finite body, whether that body is a gross material
body or a subtle body of ideas. As soon as one bends the knee, even to
logic, the knee is bent, but the people who bend the knee to pure logic
are released from bending the knee to lower order things.

Right at the bottom we have those who bend the knee, physically in the
act of copulation. They are the physical knee-benders. They are called
knee-benders because most sexual intercourse in the animal posture was
using the bent knee. In darkest India and elsewhere the gentlemen
putting their little carts on one side whilst they have a quickie, you
will see them bending the knee. Those who actually bent the knee
physically became the type of knee benders. If we cover the bottom row
of the pyramid with a lot of bricks, with little men with their knees
bent, they are all busy with their girl-friends. They are bending the
knee to the physical impulse. Immediately above this level are the men
who do not bend the knee to that but they bend the knee to the idea
that there are powerful men above them who can order them about. We can
say the bottom row is the labouring class, the workers. They are made
to work, not because they want to, they don't want to, they would much
rather have girl-friends, but because they are orientated towards
girl-friends, by the threat of castration they are kept at work.
Immediately above them are the commercialists and the clerks who don't
want to be castrated and have sufficient intelligence to realise that
if they use their heads and can learn reading, writing and arithmetic,
they can act as mediators between power-men and the knee-benders. So,
in the bureaucracy we find a lot of men who would not like to be caught
doing naughty deeds in an open field at the back of somewhere. In each
town there is a particular zone which is famous for this knee-bending
activity. This level we would call a middle class of clerks and lower
commercialistsr. Above them are the individual men who are fond of
saying that they are self-made and they mean that they feel an
individual sense of striving within themselves to give orders. They
tend to give orders to other people, either to clerks or to
knee-benders. Above this level of the top individual man are the men
who say the individual man himself is subject to cosmic law. This we
call the priests.

The list looks like this
Priests

Brahmins
Hetmen warriors, tough men who will fight for it.
Commercialists, bureaucrats
workers.
All these are circumstances. Beyond them is something which is No-
thing, the undefined, the Infinite unlimited. The caste system is
four-fold. It can be seen in the Greeks, in the same period, also in
Egypt. In India it is clearly formulated as the caste system. It is
based on the four-fold structure of an individual human being. An
individual human being is pitched either in nervous energy or intellect
or feeling or physical body. These are the four orientations. So when
we build our pyramid, we leave the top brick out because that
represents the Infinite and we divide the structure into four layers.
The top brick is left out because it represents the Infinite.
Priests, who claim to be acting in the name of the Creator or universal reason
Hetman who make individual decisions
Clerks, shop-keepers, anybody who keeps the wheels of industry turning without making decisions or having individual initiative.
The workers, who are also the knee-benders.

They are all bending the knee to something. The priests are bending the
knee to this Cosmic Logos. In Chaldea they studied astronomy and they
call it astrology in Greece, they meant by astrology what today is
meant by astronomy and they claimed that they had authority to give
orders to everybody no matter how tough as individuals they were.
Individual strong men consulted the priests to get information about
the probability that something would happen within the solar cycle. The
priests knew when the Nile was going to flood. They had astronomical
observatories and they knew exactly, by star measurements, when the
year had completed itself. Individual strong men consulted the priests,
paid the priests for the information and then used the information to
employ the commercialists to control the workers.

When we look at the statements about the Bhagavagita, we see that all
these who bend the knee are people, yet the only really people are
those physical knee-benders, the workers. In primitive societies they
are actually kept in terror by the threat of castration. It used to be
customary to make this statement very openly. You find it in the word
testament still extant. When a man swore that he would undertake
something, he swore, "If I do not fulfil this you may remove my
testicles, they are not worthy to generate. This is called a testament.
(It is etym dub. in Skeat but you can find it in respectable
dictionaries) When the workers are frightened physically by this they
just concentrate like mad on doing what work they are forced to do and
nipping out in odd moments to find the girl-friend, and spending their
evenings in making whoopee as much as possible. On the other hand, the
clerks are so terrified of being reduced to that level, that they try
to fulfil the conditions laid upon them by the individual power men,
the Hetmen. So the clerks accept education, they learn to read and
write and do arithmetic and try to pass selection exams in order to
avoid being classed knee-bending workers. They are still knee-benders
to the Hetmen above them.

The individual Hetmen above them, the Prime Ministers and the
presidents, are under the advice of the priests who claim to know
something about the way Cosmos runs. But, the priests are bending the
knee, also. Even the Archbishop bends the knee before the altar of the
Absolute. He bends the knee to this concept of universal reason in
order to impose on the individual power man, in order that he will
impose on the commercialist, in order that he will impose on the
worker. This is that hierarchy. Beyond this social system, this four
caste system, there is No-thing, no finite, there is the Absolute and
the man who aims to be reflexively self-conscious is aiming to turn
consciousness back onto itself to release it from any objectification
whatever. So the consciousness that turns out of the worker
identification into the clerk has escaped the lower knee-bending level
and identified with the clerk. The clerk who realises that if you learn
more you may become a hetman, breaks identification with the clerk
level and gets a business of his own. The individual man who realises
that there is another level above, of cosmic knowledge, might claim to
have it and become a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Napoleon and he tries
to join the priest. We get Big Charlie and the Holy Roman material
Empire formulated by such men. Each time they climb out from a lower
level they break identification by identifying with a higher level. You
break the worker concept and you become a clerk. You break the clerk
concept and you become an individual self-made man. You break this
concept and you join the cosmic priesthood. If you break this concept
you are free, you have no concept whatever. You are merely a pure
consciousness identified with no form. In so becoming you are factually
free of all the concepts below. If you are really free you won't go
about telling them that you are really free of them because they won't
like it. They will think that you are ignoring their principles, that
you need to worship their gods.

You remember that Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego refused to bend the
knee to an idol and therefore were put in a fiery furnace. The fiery
furnace referred to is the furnace of Spirit. Spirit is repre##sented
anciently by fire. Either you identify with a finite form and there-
fore worship an idol or you go into the fiery furnace. If you have got
the nerve to go into the fiery furnace, you will find an angel is with
you. In magical parlance this is your Holy Guardian Angel. It is simply
your own self at the point of reflexive awareness. You discover that
you can subsist within the No-thing which is Absolute energy.

The Gita says that out of thousands, not one tries to become perfect,
but out of the perfect, not one actually gains the goal. The workers
don't strive for perfection at all, they just strive to get through the
day in order to get off and get a pint on the way home, get a quick
wash and out again. The clerks are striving to maintain their position.
That is called keeping up with the Joneses, and the hetmen are striving
to maintain their position. Some men, who consider themselves perfect,
because perfect means pi ra fact, per fect, are claiming to be aware of
Cosmic Logos, of Universal Reason. They would call themselves the
Perfect. The Gita is referring to these men as perfect. They say, "We
know the rules." Funnily enough they are still identified with Cosmic
Logic. There is something they haven't done, or, to be more accurate,
there is Nothing they haven't done and until they do the nothing, they
haven't finished their work.

The word perfection is from 'facere' to make or do, and the PR root
which implies reason, but, as Heraclitus pointed out, reason is an
energy, formulating. When energy moves along it can move either
rotating or not. If it moves without rotating it never encloses a zone.
If after moving along for a certain distance it goes round and in the
act of going round, it encloses itself, tail in mouth, it has
rationalised and formulated itself. The energy has now become involved
in the formal system. In the act of rotating it has gone under the law
of Pi ratio. It has gone under the law of ratio, that one thing is
related to another thing, formally, and this is expressible
mathematically and geometrically, expressible in scientific terms
mathematically and geometrically. So the man who says, "I know these
things, I am perfect in this sense, my conceptual mechanism is logical
and given the appropriate data it will always come to the right
conclusion and therefore I am perfect," he means, I am rationally
doing. I am acting rationally. Yet the Gita says these Perfect, there
may be a thousand Perfect and yet not one may attain what perfection is
about. Each man when he tries to transcend, does so for a purpose. He
is trying to get out of a limitation imposed upon his will. The worker
may try to climb out and aspire to be a clerk, the clerk to be a
self-made businessman, he to be a cosmic representative or priest or
divine king but when he gets to the priest level, if he is not careful
he will start resting on his laurels. He will be satisfied with the
formulation. He now has below him the hetman the clerks and the
workers, all under his control. This makes a peculiar cycle of giving
orders, the orders are going down, producing modifications and the
feedback of the orders given gives him another problem to solve. He is
trapped within formal manifestation. Most men who are perfect in the
sense that they have logical machines that work are so self-satisfied
with their rationalising processes that they think that it is
knee-high. That is a decision they make. But, if they are satisf-#ied
to remain as big chief within Cosmos, utilising Cosmic Law and acting
rationally in conformity with it, they have not completed the purpose
of evolution.

P R is the root of pi ratio and if we spell it with a Y instead of an I
it spells pyre, which is the Greek word for fire. Heraclitus said that
the logos of the universe is an energy. This energy formulates. The
formulator tends to forget that the form is willed by the energy, that
it wills form. So he tends to stress the existing form of the universe.
He tends to go into a cosmic rut. He goes round obeying the cosmic
cycle. If there had been only that type of perfect man then we would
still be in the stage of social evolution of old Babylon. We wouldn't
have bothered to move because we would have said the stars in their
courses have fixed patterns and by studying them we can conform exactly
to them and this is life. This is exactly what the Asiatically
originating Greek Stoic philosophy said. They said the universe is a
logos, a formal structure. We understand this and therefore behave
rationally and the great man is the man who behaves rationally in
conformity with Cosmic Law. By Cosmic Law they meant this wheel of
energies formulated as the siderial system, the solar system, the
planetary system and so on. Everything is in obedience to existing
form. Some other men, who had no regard for this form and even in the
scientific sense they are determined to blast everything to bits, shift
the sun from where it is and put it somewhere else, put some stars out
and make some new ones, this is not obeying the Cosmic Law that was set
up, it is obeying something which is no law and yet is a law. Law means
that which is laid down, and the law-maker is the energy which lays
itself down. So when it says, "Of the perfect, perhaps one in a
thousand or not one in a thousand might make it," it means that when
you have reached the level of cosmic awareness that there is a logical
comic structure, if you stop there you still haven't completed the
cycle. You haven't turned your Pi ratio, your reason into the fiery
energy that generated it. Therefore you have not completed your
reflexive cycle. rr) If you examine yourself very carefully, when you
are reasoning, you will find, impelling your reason is energy. If you
are compelling very tightly you will find there is a lot of energy
behind it making you do so. You have a purpose. A purpose is something
set before you for realisation and pushing it is your will. Your will
is trying to get somewhere when it is reasoning. The reason is only a
tool for the will. If the reason sets up a form and the form then
imposes on the will, the will has duped itself with its own creation.
Therefore, even with the very highest forms, the perfect form of the
sphere, the man who is duped by this sphere to conform to it
rationally, has missed his real aim which is to rediscover the
creativity of his own will.

Shortly we can say we don't expect people as such, the knee-benders, to
work for perfection, for perfect rationality, but those beings who do
attain a perfectly rational machine in the mind, when they have
organised their mind so that it always works rationally, of those, it
is very unlikely that one of them will break out from the part that is
perfect and gain that which is above this perfect form, namely the free
will.

If we look at the structure for men again, the workers, the clerks, the
hetmen, the priests and the invisible and apply one of the yogi
doctrines we put.....
The Invisible, the Quintessence
Air this Fire
Fire
Water
Earth
invisible which is necessarily at the back of the four-fold facts we
The Quintessence in yoga parlance is Akasha. Akasha means this
invisible which is necessarily at the back of the four-fold facts we
see in the world. We see solid bodies, we see a body liquify, we see
the same body with further heat, turn into a gas, we see the same gas
become incandescent and radiate away as energy. So we see four phases
of being in the universe and these four, because they change, must be
modalities of something that we do not see. This which we do not see is
the essence, d the quintessence,the fifth essence.
Round the Earth there is an aquasphere, the sphere of water might have
been grouped together in certain deep holes to form seas.The mountains
stick up. The geosphere, the earth and the aquasphere , the water or
hydrosphere round it. Round that is an atmosphere, round that the
sphere of electro-magnetic energies, the ionosphere. All these are in
constant interplay. The animating principle of this is the heat. It
moves the air, it moves the water, it moves the earth and beyond these
is that field in which these four have appeared.

So far, the scientists have done quite a lot of measurements with their
space probes to measure the electro-magnetic belts round the earth.
They have done the hydrosphere, the geosphere the atmosphere and quite
a lot in the electro-magnetic field round the earth, but beyond these
they have done very little. Between the earth and the moon they have
begun to find that they can get readings of fields, gravitation fields.
These are really the overlappings from the electro-magnetic belts round
the earth and the moon. They doubt whether Venus has got one. If they
don't get a reading they might think it hasn't got one, because they
will have to introduce the concept of a standing field that gives no
reading on an instrument. It is still a field. In between all these
planets there is that which has condensed to form this ionosphere and
this atmosphere and hydrosphere and geosphere. That was there before
these condensations had occurred and it will be there when they
dissolve. This is the fifth, the quintessence of being. The man who is
aware of that is unformulated and absolute. He does not bend the knee
to any form at all, he bends the knee to nothing. His own being is
initiative, it is energy and he does not even bend the knee to himself.
The word 'Jew' which means the mysterious perfection of God
Himself, is used as a name for people that can even contradict
themselves, are not even bound by their own opinions of anything
whatever. We do not expect that beings who are pursuing security to
transcend form because as long as they are pursuing security they have
an idea that they are finite and they have an idea that a formulation
can protect them. So they aim at it. In the case of the worker he aims
at the roof over his head and one or two appendages to it and that is
enough. The clerk requires slightly more and the hetman requires a bit
more and the priest requires a bit more. They are still under the
canopy of heaven and they still feel fairly safe within their
definitions, within their formulations, but beyond this, the
quintessential being is unformed, he doesn't want to be secure at all.
He wants to be free and he knows that secure means tied up, locked up.
That S has gone into K, that Spirit has gone into bondage to gain
security so he prefers free from security. This doesn't stop him from
going in somebody else's house, if it is raining but it does mean he is
not dependent on the formulation. The quickest way to the
quintessential or reflexive level is just to give up the idea of
individual security. Because it is the quickest way it is therefore the
hardest way because the short cut requires a terrific amount of energy
to make the leap. The way to it is to realise that these four levels do
bend the knee, so that once a person has understood the level of the
physical knee-benders, the polloi, he doesn't like to think of himself
as down at that level, so he might start learning to read and write to
avoid being pushed around.

Some gypsies who were interviewed, said we don't like being pushed
about and we don't like having nowhere to put our caravans. If we go
for jobs at the labour exchange, the first thing they say is, "Can you
read and write?" and we say, "No," and they won't employ us. Because
they couldn't read or write they are being pushed about. As cities grow
there is less and less common land free for the gypsy mentality to camp
on. A young gypsy was asked, "Can't you get a job at all, being unable
to read or write?" He said, "Yes, I could go as a labourer but that is
hard work." The interviewer said, "But other people have to do hard
work." The gypsy said, "Yes, but I am not used to hard work." He had
been dodging it. Compassion by broad minded city dwellers might give
them a green plot to put their caravans on but if it does it is
entirely an act of mercy on the part1/ of kind hearted citizens if they
get one. There are a lot of people who think that they shouldn't exist
at all because they contribute nothing whatever to the social structure
except a picturesque figure passing across the landscape. Because of
the Law of the Inequality of finites, I will say, keep them like you
would keep a few lions and tigers and rhinos for Prince Philip to chase
after. One of each, at least or two if they are to breed. Certainly we
see that they are pushed about. When you realise it you will see that
you are pushed about as long as you bend the knee to certain stimuli,
the tendency may arise in you to try to climb out. If you haven't a lot
of energy or priority you might not remember tomorrow. You might
remember in five years time when you see a good play on a friend's TV
set, because you've never been able to afford the money yourself
because the brewer got it.

If you become a clerk you discover that you can be ordered about. You
might even become redundant at the will of the boss who might decide to
shift the whole thing from Liverpool back to Dagenham or wherever it
is. Each time you get an impulse to try to climb out. If you can't
remember what you are climbing out of tomorrow, your decision might
lapse until next year. In fact it might never recur again unless
somebody hits you very hard42. So climbing out from each level is very
hard. If you become an individual hetman climbing out of the sense of
power and being a self-made figure, especially if you have received a
title for your demonstration, can be very hard, but if you do manage to
climb out of this thing, maybe you are too old yourself but you realise
that with the money you have got, you could educate one of the children
you have got to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, or if you are lucky,
the Pope. If he climbs out you can say, "He is fulfilling my purpose,
he has gone beyond the self-made man and he is now entirely supported
by universal principles." But if he gets locked in that level, he is
still entirely subordinate to the free movement of spirit outside that
might suddenly remove the whole thing. In the year of the Wall Street
crash, 1929, when the Vatican City got itself a hundred acres of
ground, the Italian government had stolen Rome from them in the
previous century after centuries of supreme authority, they were
reduced down to a little part of their own. We can never tell where
that spirit is going to hit next because it is free, it is
unformulated. It is not determined, it is not predictable.

The symbol in the Tarot pack is the Tower. Out of this tower two men
are falling. One is the Pope and the other is a king, the powers
spiritual and the powers temporal. Coming out of the sky there is
lightning. Who knows where the lightning is going to strike? No one.
You may put your lightning conductors up but it doesn't mean i75t is
going to hit the conductor and not your building. It may. Statistics of
probability give people a feeling of security. Even if the lightning
misses you there, if it decides to come underneath and shake your
foundations, you will still fall down. There is no guarantee whatever
of continued existence for any formulated being. Therefore the only
immortal level is the level of non-formulation. To be identified with
No Thing whatever is to be quintessential and to be reflexive. You turn
back the Spirit that entered into this process, created the four castes
and you go back.

One of the significances is, the sign of Taurus, go
in, go out. If you remember that if there is an in,
there is an out, if there is a finite there is an Infinite, and so on,
and you prefer, like Abel did, the Infinite. Having learned the lesson
of Abel, you may not sacrifice in the presence of Cain, because he
doesn't like it. The canny man, if he thinks you are being Absolute
will be very upset. The perfectionist will be very upset, you are not
bending the knee to his forms and he has climbed out from below to
release himself from the orders coming to him from above. At each level
he has climbed out, he has an idea growing in his mind that some day he
will give the orders to everybody. He will be a big priest if possible
out of the order of Melchisidek and he will tell you what to do.

Question: In the Indian Dharma process is this a means of
imposing this upon people or, at its highest level it says that
if a being becomes what he is that he can achieve the way of truth or
the light itself. I see this from the priest level, from the Brahmin
level as an imposition saying you are a worker and this is your job and
this you must accept.

Answer: Yes because we know that the Absolute truth, when it has
filtered through in the way of myth or religious system, has been
abused. Nevertheless the statement is true that if a man who is at the
level of the worker bending the knee, if he could see through it and
see that this knee-bending is a function of Universal Spirit and this
is precipitated by the Absolute he could actually be free in his act.
He could re-interpret the act, he could still chase the girl in the
park and he could see it as a play of spiritual energies, he could see
that doing that was part of the cycle as part of the hierarchy. If he
did that then he<: would not be bound by it. The general test of
that is, are you doing it by inclination? If by inclination, you are
not at the level where you are doing it freely. There is a bias in the
body and if you don't want to pull your own leg, then you test yourself
on inclination, and if you can do without it completely, then and not
before, are you really doing it freely when you do it. When it says, in
the concept of Dharma, which means Law of Being, and the statement is
made, that every being fulfil the law of its own being, it is better
for a worm to worm about efficiently than for it to come out and
declare itself to be an eagle and get gobbled up. If it fulfils that
function adequately and reflexively its joy is as great as the eagles.
If it is doing it by inclination only it is under the cosmic law. The
whole test is, are we passive or active in a stimulus situation? If the
stimulus determines our behaviour we are in bondage. If the stimulus
cannot force us to behave in any way at all then what we do is a free
act and it doesn't matter what we do because matter is a modality of
Spirit. It is Spirit materialising. To be non-dualistic, it does not
matter in any way nor does it Spirit in any way unless you put a will
stress upon it. If your will is free, there are no values other than
those created by your own will.

Question: How do you break this level other than being purely involved
in it? Will it be this means of universalising it eventually?

Answer: You mean break it when you are doing a low level dharma?
Question: Say someone has worked for generations at a low level task,
at a certain point there is a break through that level where they see
that the dharma level is actually functioning, not that they see there
is a clerk level, and that they break through and become reflexively
self-conscious, where would the break through occur there?

Answer: Where they saw energy to be all there was in the environment.
Brother Lawrence does this. He sees some dead trees with no leaves on
and it is Winter. Then he remembers that in the Spring there will be
leaves like there was last year, so we knows that there is energy there
and that in its time it will come out. So, if you see the material
situation as merely a formulation of energy and you get hold of your
own energy, your will, then you are at one with the situation. Whatever
you do then you are released from it.
Question: But you are not going to strive above that?
Answer: There is no above it, because all is Spirit. The Jivamukta in
A?yoga philosophy means free in life, free while he is alive. Jiva
means individual self and moksha means freedom. You are free while you
are still an individual providing you see your individuality as pure
spirit, pure energy. The form that is there is only energy formulating.
There is no duality. There isn't a material world and a spiritual world
elsewhere waiting for you to abandon the material world to find it. It
is here and now. Frances Thompson puts it, turn a good stone and start
awake. There is an angel under every stone. If they are worldly visible
we view them, inapprehensible, we clutch them figure of speech. I hold
a pencil in my hand. If I think it is a material object other than
spirit, I am deceived, and if I think that this pencil is a modality of
spirit, then the pencil itself is a spiritual entity. Then I don't need
to go away to meditate to find Spirit because I can see it in the
pencil. The whole thing is in interpretation. You are in a situation
and the way you interpret it and nothing else, conditions how that
situation acts upon you and how you react.

The primitive mentality of the pantheists saw the wind as a wilful
spirit deliberately blowing his hair up at the back and he saw a stone
falling down onto his foot as malicious, intending to hurt him. That
was his interpretation. Today we interpret it that the stone doesn't
know why it is falling, it is just falling down towards the centre of
the earth and it is our business to remove the foot. At each level we
re-interpret we ourselves from the previous formulation, so that, daily
re-interpretation is essential to avoid getting into a formal groove
about how to look at the world. We use daily in the literal sense of
meaning any division whatever. A moment in engineering, a turning
moment, a moment of reorientation. That should be going on continuously
Statement:This is the breaking of identification in the now all the time.
Answer:Yes. Supposing somebody said, "I have heard vaguely in an
article by Aldous Huxley, there is a heaven line which one can take
through mescalin if one can get some, and there is a slightly longer
way by yoga practice. What is the shortest way to getting there?" You
say, "The method called assumption."
"What is that?")
"Assume you are there. Now act as if you are there."(
"How do you act if you are there?"
"What do you do if you have already attained your absoluteness? Ask
yourself and then do it." It is really as simple as that. Think how
much energy you need to get together to focus in a now, existentially,
where you are, and say now how will the Absolute act. Imagine a man on
the second level. He is scraping his pen in the book and it suddenly
occurs in his mind, "How would the Absolute act at this point?" There
are so many things open to him, anything could happen. He becomes free
at this moment.
"What is the weather like, sunshiney? What is the atmosphere like in
this office? Horrid, not enough oxygen. I know, I'll go and see the
boss and tell him we need more oxygen."
Now if he did this, he could get away with it. He could actually cause
the boss to produce an oxygen machine. I know a case where this
happened and he got an oxygen machine.
He has to realise what the Absolute would do in that situation and
then, overthrowing all his inertias and fears, get up and go and do it
and the moment he does it he is free. That is called the short way. Zen
is about that same thing. Zen does it negatively. It says, inhibit all
the things you know about yourself and keep on inhibiting. In the
archery thing, hold the bow and wait for the arrow to shoot. How much
time have you got? It is the negative way. The other way is shorter
than the immediate way of Zen. The immediate immediate way. Ask
yourself what would the Absolute do and the answer is "Anything. "Then
why are you doing this particular thing? That is inertia. Well, break
it." It doesn't matter what you do. Get up and go out and spend the day
in the cinema, then decide whether you will go back or not. When you
have been, maybe you won't bother to see the programme, maybe its a
lousy programme. So you go elsewhere. But to do this you have to break
the inertia of the self protection of your individual vehicle. So
although it is the short way, and is the shortest way and is the
simplest way it is not easy because of the inertias. When you realise
that there are not any things other than inertias to overcome, then you
spend your time overcoming inertias.

The word that the Gita uses for these perfected, enlightened beings,
Siddhas, you can tell by the use of the Ds inside it, that they live in
an analytical world. The S symbolises spirit and the D symbolises
analysis. That is perfectly obvious why the Gita says these perfected,
these thinking men are quite probably going to miss it because they are
formulators, they analyse. The Absolute does not analyse. Those who
have analysed, right to the top of the Cosmic Principle it is unlikely
that they will say now we will jump beyond analysis.

The book from which this question arose was interpreted by the very men
who have analysed to the top. You can't interpret that saying unless
you are pitched outside form. Otherwise you will try to rationalise it
within your conceptual structure. You can't see beyond it, otherwise
you will say how can we think about it without thinking about it. The
answer is, you can't, so give up. If we give up thinking there is
nothing there. Precisely where there is nothing, we can do something
which is the meaning of Tao Te Ching.

Yoga philosophy says this simple thing is so difficult that you should
spend all your time sweeping away the rubbish that stops you doing it.
It has the charming illustration that the Yogi sits like a lamp flame
in a windless place. He is not perturbed. This flame is itself,
reflexive awareness. It does nothing. Stimuli come and it does not
flicker. He has attained the thing in reflexiveness and he has not
formulated. The concept we have had before of the candle and the wick
and the flame. What is happening, it says, as the smith refines silver
so do the wise men fine away their defilements. The silversmith is the
mind cleaner-upper. The mind's metal is silver. The silversmith boils
this metal and lets it settle and a scum comes on top. He removes it.
He does it again, another scum comes, he does it again. He keeps on
doing it. He does it seven times and takes the scum off each time and
then he has got his refined silver. The mind with the rubbish removed
from it. All the rubbish that appears in the mind, appears for us at
our level, serially. If we dare to watch our thoughts, without
criticism, just without criticism, look at them we will be literally
amazed at the profound rubbish that goes through the mind.
Illogicalities, stupidities, resentments, hates, angers,
sentimentalities, nothing but a continuous stream of entirely valueless
stuff. This is called, watching the monkey jump.

The mind is a kind of monkey. Mon-key is key to the man. This mind just
talks tripe continually. If you watch it to become convinced of this
fact, you finally give it up, you say what a horrible thing to depend
on. But if you don't watch it, if you only look at it when you get a
good idea and you say it is a good idea and it is mine, then you have
got trouble. Look at the other times when you don't get that brilliant
idea and see what you are up to. This is about nearly a hundred per
cent of the time. The mind is turning out rubbish, so you have to say,
"I'm getting rid of the rubbish." Boiling this silver, boiling the mind
is the same thing as getting annoyed. It is the anger, the heat that is
generated in you by opposition that boils your mind. This is where, if
you are a very smart fellow, you will employ a boiler, that is,
somebody to annoy you. Without this annoyance you cannot become aware
of the parts of the mind that are really storing up this rubbish.
Opposition is true friendship. Get somebody to insult you and see how
your mind reacts. Don't waste time looking at him, look at your own
reaction. You find the mind is full of rubbish. Eventually you become
convinced that the mind is rubbish.

This candle, when it is burning, is like brother Cain, call it Cain's
doll if you like. There is a wick in it. The word 'wick' means quick.
That is like your spinal cord. Your consciousness is like a flame and
as it is burning, the wax of this candle is going down. It is called
wax but it wanes as you burn it. It is the flame that waxes and the wax
is called wax because it wanes and makes the flame wax. As your body is
progressively being purified, the elements which were hidden in
unconscious and sub-conscious processes in the body, appear as wisdom,
as consciousness and they won't do unless you set fire to the body. The
only way you can set fire to the body is by annoying it and most bodies
are so adequately defended against self-annoyance that the only
effective way is to get a friend to annoy you. This thing about being
annoyed is really terribly important and watch in your mind. If you
could have two or three evenings in a week just saying rude things to
each other. It is actually a good thing. It doesn't matter if somebody
abuses it and starts being rude for what they would internally feel is
just venom, they've always wanted to do this exercise. It does not
matter at all. It is how the individual receives it. This is for every
individual to take this annoyance and switch the attention off this man
because he never did annoy you in any case, he knows nothing about it,
he has merely shot one of his arrows. You have a tender spot, examine
your tender spot. A very, very good exercise. I recommend it.
Incidentally, it is quite a good idea to pay each other in presents for
very good annoyances for which illuminations, one Mars bar shall be
awarded for every bitterness felt. It is a good way to do it.

Question: Why did you invert air and fire in this particular analysis?
Answer: Because in this particular caste system diagram, the air men
actually consider themselves superior to the fire men. The Air men, in
India, the Brahmin, place themselves on top. In a long time, by their
airy tricks have duped the individual to be subordinate to them. The
airy men were formulating these things and the energy men were too busy
to stop them, so they imposed on the clerks and the workers and they
utilised the tendency of fire men to go out and fight. As the fire men
liked to do this they encouraged them to make armies and go and knock
somebody off in an adjacent territory. For a long time this was quite
alright but when the unit of society got bigger and bigger, gradually
the fire men realised that they had only been doing what they wanted to
do when they went out fighting and that the stay at home air men had
been consolidating their position. When the military leaders went out
and conquered something and came back and wanted glory, they found that
the men who were giving permission for the celebration were air men who
had not fought. This is like the blessing of great warriors by
archbishops. At a certain point, the fire men said these men have no
power at all, they just consolidate their position with logic and words
while we are out fighting but they really can't fight. They rose up one
night and they usurped the position and they severely threatened the
air men,the priests, and said, now if you do not bless us with the
blessing of your universally logical God in public, where people can
see it and say we are divine, we will cut your heads off. At that
moment they inverted the thing and the fire men went on top and the
divine right of kings was born.(r)(r)The obvious case of that is Henry
the Eighth. It seemed convenient for him to be subordinate to the Pope
on account of the divorce that he needed and some money invested in the
monasteries and he doesn't see any reason why he should go to Rome, he
just asserts himself, breaks with the Papacy and declares himself head
of the church. He is a fire man who said, well you have had your bit of
fun, as long as it is convenient for me to do it, alright. I know you
have no power except the power conferred upon you by a loose tongue. I
too can develop one of those, which he does. Then he not only becomes
king but head of the church and curiously enough he still remained
Catholic in faith. He wasn't a Protestant. Thereby he was quite right
to take all the money out of the monasteries because they were his.
That was a typical example in England as the same thing happened in
India. The fire men got fed up with the Air men rationalising their
wages for them and took over. Then they employed the rationalisers to
justify what they wanted to do next, which is the position of all
established religions. The established church in any country is there
to give universal reason or divine blessing on whatever the king wants
to do.(

Question: Are the others back on top now in western countries?
Answer: No, they will never get on top again it was only in the early
stage of human evolution that they could get on top when the fire men
were always busy and the world was big enough to chase about.

Question:Would that have been about the period of Gemini? Where would you place the period of the Air Men?
Answer: Yes, the Hetmen were active men, making decisions and assuming
responsibilities without any regard other than their will to do it.
They took over in the period of Taurus. Before that everybody in Cancer
was intuitive and in fact you couldn't do much with them at all. When
you went to catch them for taxes, they had left on intuition!